Scripting portal administration
Portal for ArcGIS is designed to expose its functionality through web services. You can call these services from the ArcGIS REST API, thereby automating the management of your portal's users, groups, and content. See the API reference section titled Managing your organization.
For example, using the ArcGIS REST API, you can:
- Add and remove users from groups
- Upload and publish items
- Search items
- Federate one or more ArcGIS Server sites with your portal. To do this, you must call the Register Server operation. Then on the server you must call Update Security Configuration.
- Designate a federated server as the portal's hosting server.
Through the ArcGIS REST API, you can invoke every administrative task that Portal for ArcGIS supports. In fact, the portal website uses this API behind the scenes to accomplish its administrative actions.
The ArcGIS REST API can be invoked from any language that can make a web service call, such as Python, Java, JavaScript, PowerShell, C#, Ruby, Scala, Perl, and others. You do not need any Esri software installed to run a script that uses the ArcGIS REST API.